Upgrade Blake Crouch Quotes

What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there's no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.

We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.

I suspect that, if we all had perfect memory, we would all grieve the older versions of we used to be the way we grieve departed friends.

Maybe compassion and empathy are just squishy emotions. Illusions created by our mirror neurons. But does it really matter where they come from? They make us human. They might be what make us worth saving.

No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream.

You can’t kill humanity to save humanity. Human beings are not a means to an end.

I had extraordinary dreams, and an ordinary mind.

Higher intelligence doesn't make you less greedy or self-centered or evil. It doesn't necessarily make you a good person.

We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves.

Doesn’t feel like intelligence itself is the answer. It terrifies me to think of a world where we have all the same problems, a billion less friends, and everyone thinks they’re smart enough to be infallible.

I suspect that, if we all had perfect memory, we would all grieve the older versions of who we used to be the way we grieve departed friends.

It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize. No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream.

Being smart doesn't make people infallible, it just makes them more dangerous.

You’re working off a flawed assumption. Higher intelligence doesn’t make you less greedy or self-centered or evil. It doesn’t necessarily make you a good person.

All the existential threats to our existence live under the umbrella of climate change.

The greatest threat to our species lies within us.

What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there’s no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.

Hunger, disease, war, warming- these threats loom over us like building storm clouds. But ninety-nine percent of humanity reads about our crumbling world in the morning headlines, then ignores it and gets on with their day.

Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning

Human nature will be the last part of nature to surrender to man.- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize.

But I didn’t live in a world where any of my dreams were possible anymore.

If there’s a solution, it has to lie in reaching us from our ambivalence. Our apathy.

So you’re saying people are too stupid?” Basri asked. “Not just that,” Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done.

It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.

What if you create a bunch of people who are just drastically better at what they already were. Soldiers. Criminals. Politicians. Capitalists.

If I lose the ability to hurt, I also lose my grasp on joy—those brief moments of contentment that make consciousness worth the voyage.

There’s no one else on this planet I would rather have ten thousand dinners with.

If I lose the ability to (feel) hurt, I also lose my grasp on joy -- those brief moments of contentment that make consciousness worth the voyage.

People with those kinds of ambitions—they aren’t like the rest of us. There’s a relentlessness in them. They think they want peace. They think achievement will bring it to them. It never does.

Life never really goes the way you want or expect. Usually, even getting exactly what you want turns out not to have been what you really wanted. So, my son, if you ever find a sliver of happiness and peace, just be thankful and live. Don’t reach for more, because a sliver is more than most people ever find.

We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxically—tragically—our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it.

But I didn’t live in a world where any of my dreams were possible anymore. And the hardest truth — the one that had been eating me slowly for most of my adult life — was that even if it was, I didn’t possess a fraction of the raw intelligence of an Anthony Romero or Miriam Ramsay. I had extraordinary dreams and an ordinary mind.

our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it.

Finally understood that free will did not exist, because I could not choose my desires, only whether to pursue them.

Feelings are also the core of compassion and empathy. We’re becoming capable of rationalizing anything. Maybe sentiment helps with the checks and balances.

Put simply: Our situation was fucked, and we weren’t doing enough to un-fuck it.

To save humanity, I needed my humanity.

The absence of sensory gating is a key marker for schizophrenia, and actually contributes to making people go insane. An existence without gating would be torture.

Mostly, I just sit by the kitchen window, watching the sea change.

If nothing changes, we will die off for the stupidest reason imaginable—because we refused, for so many childish reasons, to do the obvious things that would save us.

Maybe compassion and empathy are just squishy emotions. Illusions created by our mirror neurons. But does it really matter where they come from? They make us human. They might even be what make us worth saving.

You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the Moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life. —Erwin Chargaff

We were a monstrous, thoughtful, selfish, sensitive, fearful, ambitious, loving, hateful, hopeful species. We contained within us the potential for great evil, but also for great good. And we were capable of so much more than this.

Life never really goes the way you want or expect. Usually, even getting exactly what you want turns out not to have been what you really wanted. So, my son, if you ever find a sliver of happiness and peace, just be thankful and live.

Poverty, disease, starvation, and all the hatred those hardships breed, growing worse every decade—as we squeeze the last drops from our planet’s resources. We can’t keep living in denial about what’s happening or hoping that it’s someone else’s problem to solve.

Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.

We walked back to the hotel under a deep navy sky bejeweled with stars. In the center of the plaza a choir was singing. They held quivering candles, and their voices lilted icily into the sky. I didn't see the moment. Not really. I saw the story behind the moment - a tale passed down over two thousand years that told of a child of a superbeing sent to save the world. Never before had I seen Homo Sapiens so clearly - a species, at its most fundamental level, of story tellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometimes brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.

It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally

The future was here, and it was a fucking mess.

It takes everything in my power not to break down. I had stopped using my emotional Faraday cage months ago. To save humanity, I needed my humanity.

I want to tell them I still love them, and also how that love has been changed and deepened—made infinitely more complex by the intimacy of being able to relive every memory of them in perfect detail. But I have no words. Or none that would be sufficient. And so I settle for dividing my consciousness and decelerating my perception of time to the slowest possible crawl, savoring every elongated second of their touch, their warmth, their smell, their presence.

We're going to find out who did this and take a serious shit in their coffee.

We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.

No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream. But that wasn’t my fate any longer. My mind was becoming a diamond.

Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in doing so, can imbue a cold, random, sometimes brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.

A man in a white lab coat appeared in the doorway, and when he saw me, he smiled. Ty Feld was two inches shorter than me, with curly, grizzled black hair, bushy sideburns, and a mustache more befitting a saloon owner. The GPA had kept Feld in its sights for years. We’d never gone after him, even though we knew he lived in the penthouse of Tower of Babel and operated out of a handful of old buildings in the abandoned sprawl of Las Vegas. Officially, we’d never been told why he was off-limits, but we all knew. He was a back-alley contractor for DARPA. He sold them illicit biotech and occasionally coughed up legit intel on bioterrorists and competitors to the GPA. So all things being equal, he was allowed to run his business of exotic synthetic creatures as long as he justified the freedom he was allowed.

Eighteen,” she said. “What?” She coughed blood. “We had eighteen perfect moments.” I thought about it. “Nineteen.” “How do you get nineteen?” “This one. But I’m sorry to have it.

Right and wrong are constructs born of human sentiment. Nothing but stories we’ve made up and assigned meaning to. They don’t correspond to any objective reality. The only thing real is survival.

My mother had said, “Hunger, disease, war, warming—these threats loom over us like building storm clouds. But ninety-nine percent of humanity reads about our crumbling world in the morning headlines, then ignores it and gets on with their day.” She looked around the table. “You’re all here with me in Shenzhen, trying to do your part to solve crop failure, which might be a step toward solving hunger and famine. Trying to be part of the solution.” She leaned forward, suddenly energized. “If more people were like us, imagine what we could accomplish. New crops to feed the millions going hungry. Stopping pandemics from raging across our world. Ending most disease and all poverty and all war. No more mass extinctions. Clean, renewable, limitless energy. Spreading into the solar system.” Twenty years later, as the hot water beat down on my back, I felt a chill run through me. “So you’re saying people are too stupid?” Basri asked. “Not just that,” Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.

Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself?

It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.” I

No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream

Higher intelligence doesn’t make you less greedy or self-centered or evil. It doesn’t necessarily make you a good person.

What allows human beings to concentrate on things amid the maelstrom of infinite stimuli is a neurological process called sensory gating. It filters out low-relevance (redundant or unnecessary) stimuli in the brain from all possible environmental stimuli. If this didn’t happen, we would experience an overload of irrelevant information in the higher cortical centers.

...the light of my lonely summer evenings stretched past ten o'clock, the water like glass until a fish leaped and the sun lingering, lingering- a guest who wouldn't leave.

I wondered who I had become. What I had become. I wept. I screamed. I laughed hysterically. I clawed at my skin and ripped out my hair. I wanted to die. I wanted to live forever.

And I was struck again with the awareness that I was alive in strange times. There was a palpable sense of things in decline.

I pulled out a small, leather-bound journal I always carried with me, flipped

I followed them up, our footfalls clanging on the metal.

Twelve minutes after takeoff from Harry Reid International, we leveled off at 95,000 feet. It was an eighty-seater Boeing, and though the ramjets propelled us at a mile per second, there was no sense of movement until I looked down and saw the old-school supersonic jets seven miles below, and the older-school subsonic jets another four miles below them. They all seemed to be racing backward.

I wondered if I could linger in moments, let each second become a world unto itself.

The sound coming through the curtained windows was different. Muffled. It was snowing.

The Gene Protection Agency was headquartered in Constitution Center, in the same office space that had once housed the National Endowment for the Arts.

The urge to wall myself off from the ache is acute. But I want to feel it. If I lose the ability to hurt, I also lose my grasp on joy—those brief moments of contentment that make consciousness worth the voyage.

Walla Walla, Washington

He met me ten feet from the others, moving with a light-footedness and grace that belied his size. The man towered over me—it was as if a boulder had sprouted arms and legs. “Is Feld inside?” I absorbed his reaction in the starlight: surprise. He lifted his left arm and spoke in his native tongue into the end of his sleeve. After thirty seconds, his eyes shifted; he was listening to someone in his earpiece. He responded, “Da, da, da.

Only eight companies in the world built the type of hardware she would need: Atom Computing, Xanadu, IBM, ColdQuanta, Zapata Computing, Azure Quantum, and Strangeworks.

Escaping the gravity of human emotion — living without all that anger, heartbreak, sorrow — it’s so much easier. Quieter.

(spanghew: to throw violently into the air; especially, to throw (a frog) into the air from the end of a stick).

So I bought some clothes at a thrift store, cleaned myself up,

$432 to my name.

I was broke. Homeless. Badly injured. Wanted.

I thought I was a woman in search of peace in a place of my own.

Money held no interest for me beyond the freedom it provided.

I had extraordinary dreams and an ordinary mind.

You could almost feel the fear in the air—a living thing. These poor people. They must have been scared out of their minds, wondering what psychotic twist of fate had brought this disease into their midst.

If there’s a solution, it has to lie in rescuing us from our ambivalence. Our apathy.

She shrugged. “I know we aren’t close, but you’re my brother. I’d kill an army for you.

We were planning a weekend trip to the Shenandoah Valley to see the fall colors from the Skyline Drive.

Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.

My bum ankle that had never fully healed after a nasty sprain in my thirties didn’t bother me anymore.

And I was struck, again, as an outside observer, by how much the members of our species needed one another. All these people are out in the cold rain. To Laugh and drink. To talk about nothing. It was almost as if that need for connection and touch was our... their.. lifeblood.

In the absence of compassion, selfishness is the most rational response

Humans have had 300,000 years on this planet. We lived from the stone-age to the space age We split the atom and sequenced our own DNA and built machines that could think. But for all our progress, ten million people die of hunger every year. We have hyperloops and rampant nativism. Phones more power than the computer that took us to the moon but no more coral reefs. And year after year, nothing changes.

What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there's no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight

This hurts me deeply; and it makes me happy. What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there’s no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.

Usually, even getting exactly what you want turns out not to have been what you really wanted. So, my son, if you ever find a sliver of happiness and peace, just be thankful and live. Don’t reach for more, because a sliver is more than most people ever find.

O que estava em jogo era o futuro da nossa espécie. Para onde iríamos. O que nos tornaríamos. Kara tinha dado início à Guerra Genética.

I could read a book with my eyes while simultaneously listening to an audiobook, and comprehend each one to a seventy percent degree of accuracy.